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Sea Peoples: Who were they, where did they come from?

I love this topic. I wrote this about a year ago and saved it on my computer. I'm not sure where else it is. I hope after reading this you will have a better understanding of the Sea People. I also apologize for any grammatical mistakes, I'm going to patch those up after work:

The Sea Peoples were a confederation of different cultures from all over that banded together and added to their ranks the freshly conquered. Off the top of my head some of the peoples are the Shardana (from Sardinia?), The Sikil people (Sicily?), the Ekwesh (It’s a mystery) and even the Greeks as they were the first Bronze Age civilization to collapse.

These migrations were brought on by a bunch of reasons and there are quite convincing theories for some of them. Due to the records taken from trees from that time we now know that at the very same time as the Bronze Age Collapse there were several successive years of extreme drought; I'd say it was the droughtiest drought that ever drought. If you’re curious as to how that was determined, archaeologists found trees that were that old and counted rings. The rings at the time of the Collapse were very close together which means an extreme lack of water and so growth. There were several rings at that time very close together which denotes consecutive years of drought. This as you can imagine would be devastating to cosmopolitan city dwelling civilizations that relied on industrial scale farming and vast trade networks to feed the incredibly high populations of the time. A highly active trade community, specialization, and a comparative advantage in something in different lands allowed necessary goods to be traded for luxuries and in many places the artificially bloated population far outstripped the actual capacity of the lands they inhabited.

The drought theory states that the drought is the reason that different nations were hit at different times in a successive trend across the land and were destroyed at different levels. The Egyptians may have been affected the least because their agriculture relied on the trusted flooding of the Nile with waters that congregated much further south where there was no drought. Their crop yields were so little affected compared to their neighbors that the kings of rival nations, very recently as powerful if not superior to the Egyptians, were now pleading for the Pharaoh's charitable intervention. The king of the Hittites, in one cuneiform tablet, writes to the Pharaoh begging for a ship to be fitted and crewed then filled with hundreds of tons of grain! He then punctuated the demand with a somewhat humbling plea "Please. My country is dying." The kings gained legitimacy from divine right and the promise of protection; a father to his people and a medium for the spiritual exchange of gods and men. When the king and the nobles were no longer able to provide to their citizens the living standards that peoples spoiled by cosmopolitan civilization expect there was a violent upheaval of some sort. It wasn't just a typical lack of services either.

These people were all starving to death! Greece makes poor farmland for the industrial scale required for its population at the time. They were content selling goods like olives, opium, and anything they could make for food shipped in from elsewhere. This was also a more profitable decision for them as those luxury goods fetched a desirable price compared to common grains and cereals at market. But, what happens when a drought hits your neighbors as well? The gods may help you win a victory over your enemies or send a soaring eagle over the battlefield as if to wink at your generals. But, where nature was concerned, the gods were content to see their charges suffer together below for who could discern a skeleton of Athens or a skeleton from Hatti when held together in a fraternal embrace of starvation.

Not only does the exchange between the Pharaoh and the King of the Hittites speak to the massive size of Egyptian trade vessels of the time huge) but also to the intense nature of the crisis. One of the strongest empires of the time was begging their eternal enemy for enough food to feed the people of his country, stabilize his dominion, and save his lineage and empire! As the systems collapse unfolded throughout the Mediterranean at the time the frightened dictators sowed peace treaties in order to save their way of life from the Apokolypsis. Anxiety and agita brought men ordained by the gods to their knees like frightened children. They fought for the status quo despite the migrations and crises til the end and died save the Pharaoh.

I wonder if at the end they wondered if maybe they were ignorant to their own peoples lives and suffering. Did they wonder if they could have been the cause for the violent implosion of their own way of life? Did they find it absurd that they never shit in a hole in the ground, went to bed hungry, or touched anything underfoot but marble and when without floated in the air in a litter held by servants? Did they think that by separating themselves almost completely from the people they claimed to love, as a father does their children, that it could dehumanize them to the masses and make them an easy target for retribution? Was their claimed access to the gods put into question when the rains never fell and so they were held accountable? Did the king piss himself and die? Was he left locked up in the palace screaming orders to guards of questionable loyalty before they chose life over death with a deranged dictator and joined the mobs? Did the king take poison with their families alone in a room together choosing a quiet death and a more peaceful eternity in the afterlife over a violent torturous death and rape at the hands of a starving furious wave of combined human condition? We really can't say but you can let your own imagination fill in the blanks. What we do know is that in every palatial center the devastation is eerily similar. Within a very short span of time, their influence was gone. The temples were burned. The palaces were burned. The people were burned. Those remaining starved to death or took flight to the country side or boarded a ship and still likely died... but there was a chance! These beleaguered peoples, when their own metropolis was destroyed, left behind the cushy city life to set forth into an unknown to find a better life and learn to fend more primitively for themselves. If it so arises that there are already people laying claim to where they happen to land then they either reverse and change course and lose more husbands, wives, children, parents, sisters, brothers, uncles, aunts, nieces, and cousins or the men looked to each other for strength as they knew they were about to take on what was likely a vaunt empire or another.

Luckily for these Sea Peoples, their disorganized and lightly armed mob of traders, farmers, and warriors had an advantage over their expensive, highly trained, and few adversaries. Find the land, pacify the land, settle the land, and live. Close your eyes and imagine the primal motivation at play here as you hold the rigging with one hand and point at a beach head with the other. Imagine having to attack an innocent people due to a kind of sick and twisted fate that makes you the one that's backed into a corner. Once you displace and incorporate these people, those that have no room to settle pack up and move on. This process apparently occurred several times throughout the brief, yet brutal, upheaval. The Sea Peoples were not the cause of the collapse as some historians would believe. They were a symptom.

And I read one (most likely not true) source saying they were the original blacks who lived in Italy and Greece, forced out by Etruscans.

Where did you read that?